National romances: romantic love and nationalism.

Sommer, Doris. “Love and Country in Latin America: An Allegorical Speculation”. Cultural Critique 16 (Autumn 1990), pp. 109–28.

Through the analysis of national novels Sommer is set to tackle the relationship betweeen politics and erotics in Latin America. She argues that narratives of love have been central to the disciplining of subjects within national projects, marked by the conflicts and eventual coming together, reconciliation and amalgamation of different (class, race, region, religious, culture) sectors, producing the effect of: suggesting the productive (though transgressive and heroic) union of different actors in favor of a national project, and at the same time, creating the effect of (sexual, romantic or familial) intimacy among national subjects, resulting in a "passionate patriotism." While romantic love engenders the nation, nationalism is based on romantic love. She produces a dialogue between Foucault's "history of the bodies" and Anderson's "history of national bodies", looking for the productive intersection of their claims about sexuality, the self, and national fictions. Just as in modern societies it becomes inescapable for subjects to have a "true sex" that defines the self, it is to have a nationality. In this way "foundational novels are precisely those fictions that try to pass for truth and to become the ground for political association." (124)

Comments

  1. JonOctober 29, 2009 at 1:50 PM

    Of course, Sommer is talking about novels written at the end of the nineteenth-century and the beginning of the twentieth. Often they are still canonical and still taught at secondary school, for instance. But do you think that a similar process is at work with other genres today? Are telenovelas (say), national romances? Or perhaps they are transnational, and so rather go against the grain of Sommer's argument?

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